Season 3 Episode 02 of the Intralingo World Lit Podcast, featuring authors and translators from around the globe.
Lisa Carter talks to Zhang Ling and Shelly Bryant about their novel, A Single Swallow. The discussion covers the themes of trauma, war and memory, informed by Ling’s work as a clinical audiologist, discoveries she made on her research trips to China, the voices of the narrators, the beauty of the language of the original, and so much more.
Zhang Ling is the award-winning author of nine novels and numerous collections of novellas and short stories. Born in China, she moved to Canada in 1986. In the mid-1990s, she began to write and publish fiction in Chinese while working as a clinical audiologist. Since then she has won the Chinese Media Literature Award for Author of the Year, the Grand Prize of Overseas Chinese Literary Award, and Taiwan’s Open Book Award. Among Zhang Ling’s work are Gold Mountain Blues and Aftershock, adapted into China’s first IMAX movie with unprecedented box-office success.
Shelly Bryant divides her year between Shanghai and Singapore, working as a poet, writer, and translator. She is the author of eleven volumes of poetry, a pair of travel guides for the cities of Suzhou and Shanghai, a book on classical Chinese gardens, and a short story collection. She has translated Chinese text for publishers such as Penguin Books and various organizations, including the National Library Board in Singapore and the Human Sciences Research Council. Her translation of Sheng Keyi’s Northern Girls was long-listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2012, and her translation of You Jin’s In Time, Out of Place was short-listed for the Singapore Literature Prize in 2016. Shelly received a Distinguished Alumni award from Oklahoma Christian University in 2017.
The book is available in all formats and from all sellers. [Affiliate link] https://bookshop.org/a/4438/9781542041508
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Thanks for listening!
~Lisa
Lisa Carter, Founder & Creative Director, Intralingo Inc.
CHINA – Interview with author Zhang Ling and translator Shelly Bryant